The article isn't talking about brain teasers. Google did indeed banish them, but now they've switched to 4-5 interviews where you're asked a short coding probl

The article isn't talking about brain teasers. Google did indeed banish them, but now they've switched to 4-5 interviews where you're asked a short coding problem. The problems themselves aren't difficult and given the time constraint, you can fit the answer in the height of one whiteboard. The trick is that you have to be fast, optimal and correct (i.e. syntax counts). From my experience, you should be able to complete each problem in about 20 minutes - i.e. a good enough solution that the interviewer moves on. The article is right: there are books and books on doing these toy problems with array manipulation, tree traversals, sort/search and so on. If you did a TopCoder SRM every night for a few months, you would probably ace most of these interviews. But this is the issue: the interviews basically test how well you prepared. They don't simulate a work environment and I don't think I was ever asked any serious questions about my work experience/research beyond chit-chat. Given that I was applying for a specialist computer vision role, that was a bit surprising.